A Letter to the Brother I’ve Wondered About My Entire Life (August 17, 2026)

This is the only picture of all four of your full blooded family members. WRS fathered a child prior to your birth in 1967. And ACD and her new husband had a son who was born in 1978. So technically you have two half brothers as well. Our family is full of secrets that people have in fact taken to their graves. I tried to learn more and got shut down. But I was able to piece together my father’s history with his own images and personal effects of which are categorized by year. This picture was taken in 1975 after my mother had left Colorado for a second time, once right after you were born and again after our brother was born in 1974. They had separated in Colorado and this is the last images of them together in Gilead, Maine.

I’ve Never Seen My Brother’s Face, but I Wonder if I’d See My Dad

To the Brother I’ve Never Known

August 17 has carried a weight in my heart for a very long time.

When I was in high school, I learned that before the life I knew, my mom and dad had a son. He was born on August 17, 1968, at St. Anthony Hospital in Lakewood, Colorado.

My brother.

Even writing those words feels strange, because I have never met him.

I don’t know his voice. I don’t know what makes him laugh. I don’t know what his life has looked like, whether he has a family, what he loves, what he’s survived, or whether he has ever wondered about us.

There are no childhood photographs of the two of us. No shared Christmases. No fights over stupid things. No inside jokes. No memories of him protecting his little sister or me driving him crazy.

There is simply this empty space where an entire relationship might have been.

This is where things get interesting. Our parents lived in an apartment in 1968 and you were born at St. Anthony Hospital in Lakewood, Colorado. Then they moved back to Maine and began their lives together. I was born in 1972 in a home my father built for his family. And then for some reason, they moved back to Lakewood, Colorado in 1973. This is the home they lived in and our brother was born in 1974. Shortly after this, our parents separated and our mother moved back to Maine. Our father stayed in this home and worked at Coors as an Engineer until he moved to California in 1978.

And somehow, you can miss someone you’ve never met.

You can grieve a person who is still alive.

You can feel love for someone who exists almost entirely in your imagination because the simple truth that they are your family is enough to make them matter.

For years, I haven’t really known what to do with these feelings. It has always been one of those quiet things I carried around inside me—something too complicated to explain and too painful to casually bring up.

Because what do you call the feeling of knowing your brother is somewhere out there in the world, living an entire lifetime you know nothing about?

This is the only picture I have of me and both of our parents. You were born in 1968 in Lakewood, Colorado and four years later, I was born in 1972 in Norway, Maine. Our baby brother was born in 1974 in Lakewood, Colorado. Shortly after our brother was born when he was about six months old, our parents split up and our mother moved back to Maine with me and our younger brother. Shortly, she would meet her second husband and eventually get married and have another child. Our dad moved to California in 1978 where he got a job as a civil engineer for Mare Island Naval Shipyard.

Today he turns 58.

And I wonder where he is.

I wonder if he’s happy.

I wonder what his life became.

I wonder whether there are pieces of my dad in him that I would recognize immediately. A mannerism. A smile. A sense of humor. A way of looking at the world.

Sometimes I even wonder whether we have walked past each other somewhere without knowing.

There are so many questions, and there may never be answers.

But on August 17, I remember that somewhere in this world is a man who came into this life before me, born to the same mother and father, whose existence changed something inside me the moment I learned about him.

Here’s a picture of your mother and your siblings in Lakewood, Colorado shortly after our brother was born in 1974. I’m not exactly sure what happened to our parent’s relationship because neither of them would talk about it. The only thing I know is our mother resents our father because you were given up for adoption. And after our mother left our father, our lives would go down hill. I hope you had a lot better life than we did. Our mother blames our father for everything but in the end, he was the kind and gentle soul that she tried to turn us against for revenge. (Original Photo by WRS)

He may not know me.

He may never know how often I have wondered about him.

But he has never been nothing to me.

He has always been my brother.

So today, wherever you are, I hope life has been kind to you. I hope you have been loved. I hope you’ve had people beside you who made you feel safe and wanted. I hope you’ve laughed hard, seen beautiful places, and built a life that feels like your own.

I’m not sure how our mother got back to Maine with us two kids. There was this photo and one other in Niagara Falls, New York. Someone took the picture of our mother and us two kids in New York. My father took this photo. I am assuming my dad’s younger brother helped my mother get back to Maine but I could be wrong. I am unable to ask Uncle Brian because he passed away unexpectedly in December 2019. I didn’t make this discovery until after I started putting things in chronological order. It’s sad that I have to put the pieces of my own life together like this. (Original Photo by WRS)

And I hope somehow, in whatever mysterious way love travels through this world, you know that there is a little sister out here who has thought about you for many years.

Who has wondered.

Who has cared.

And who, on your birthday, is thinking about you again.

Happy 58th birthday to the brother I’ve never known.

You have always had a place in my heart, even though you never had the chance to have a place in my life.

This is the last known image of us before arriving back in Maine where your siblings were raised until we graduated from high school. We hope you were adopted by a loving and supportive family. We on the other hand would get the beat down of a lifetime from our mother and her new husband. And quite frankly it felt like both our mother and her new husband resented our father and his two kids. They had no love for me whatsoever. I am not going to speak for our brother or our half brothers. I pray your situation was better than ours. We lost our only protector when our father died in 2001.

Photo Sources:

All these photos were part of William R. Stowell’s collection. I do not know who took the first photo at a swimming hole in Evans Notch in Gilead, Maine. I also do not know who took the photo of me, my mother and my father but I suspect it was my Aunt Rebecca. She visited them prior to our brother being born in 1974 because there are photos that our father took in the 1973 time frame. I am in the process of uploading all of his pictures to this website.

Jennifer and Lee

Our Love, Our Freedom, Our Story